


Ardent for Some Desperate Glory

by Kenzi_Ro



Series: HKM Stories [3]
Category: The Hobbit (2012), The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Battle of Five Armies, Character Death, Gen, mild descriptions of gore and violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-04
Updated: 2013-03-04
Packaged: 2017-12-04 07:51:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/708315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kenzi_Ro/pseuds/Kenzi_Ro
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Oin is a healer.</p><p>On his table, a patient is only a patient, nothing more.</p><p>He can't save them all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ardent for Some Desperate Glory

**Author's Note:**

> 'Technically' written for the Hobbit Kink meme: http://hobbit-kink.livejournal.com/5346.html?thread=11754978#t11754978
> 
> I say technically because I actually had half of this story written on a whim BEFORE I came across that prompt. I just modified and extended it to fit the prompt. So 'technically' it was written for the HKM.
> 
> Title comes from the poem Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen. It seemed appropriate.

The tent is crowded, the wounded soldiers crying out for mercy until their voices mingle and no words can be discerned. It stinks of blood and filth, and the stench of the dead covers everything in a nauseous pall. 

Oin has been watching the men die for hours. He doesn't know if the Battle still rages beyond the ridge or if the end has come and the living are searching the field for survivors. He doesn't know if his brother has fallen, or if his friends still live.

All he knows is blood and screams of pain as the wounded thrash, loud enough that even he can hear them clearly. Worse are the gasps that he cannot hear, but can see dragging themselves out of his patients' throats. Worse are the way their hands tremble on their chests and twitch at their sides, devoid of the energy to lift them.

He's lost count of injured he's treated, the dead he's walked away from.

The body-bearers make their way through, carting the dead away and replacing them with the injured and dying. It's an unending stream of bodies, and the healers race from one to the next, desperate to find one life to save amid the tide of death.

A healer - a novice of some sort, with blood covering her shift - rushes up to him and gestures him to follow. She says something he cannot hear, but her hand is warm on his arm as she leads him passed dead and dying soldiers. 

There are two new bodies on his tables, and the novice gestures frantically towards them. Oin realizes why a second later when he sees the once-golden hair of Prince Fili.

They look terribly large on his tables, red with blood and bodies struggling against their wounds. He looks at them and forces himself to see two soldiers awaiting his aid, not the cheerful companions who had brightened the journey to Erebor with their laughter and good cheer.

Fili, he dismisses quickly as being his secondary concern, for a brief glance is all he needs to know what injury the elder Prince has sustained. Kili, he is uncertain about.

The novice takes her cue from him and gently parts the younger Prince's rent chain mail so that Oin's fingers might examine the damage. What he finds would turn the stomach of a Dwarf with less experience, or one that had not spent so many hours already tending to the dying.

The flesh is bloody red and fragments of white bone peak out from beneath it. Whatever blow he had taken had cut the lad's chest wide open. It was a miracle that he'd survived long enough to be brought to the tents. 

A miracle, yes, but a cruel one, Oin knows, full of pain and terror which would only be relieved by the sleep of death.

The novice pales as Oin pulls his hands back from Kili's chest and shakes his head. The Prince is gasping for breath, blood spilling out of his mouth, and hands twitching beside him. There's nothing to be done for him. Even if Oin had all his supplies and no other patients, there would be nothing he could do for the lad.

He turns away from the younger Prince to look at his elder brother. Fili's eyes are wet and he has a terrible look of understanding on his face when Oin turns towards him. Five arrows litter his chest, and blood seeps out around the black shafts weakly.

His fingers tremble and his breath is short. Oin barely has time to catch his hand and smooth bloody hair back before Fili falls still. The breath stops, the eyes grow dull, and Oin is left with nothing more than a body.

Claiming a single moment for himself, he pulls the hand he is holding to his forehead and murmurs a prayer of passing. Then he sets the arm down and puts a dirty white cloth over the Prince's face.

The body-bearers will be through soon to move the dead and make room for the still living.

Oin has more patients to see to, maybe to save. There is nothing more he can do here. He can waste no more time on their hopeless fates and broken bodies. He spares another moment to press his hand to Kili's forehead and murmur a prayer for easy passage beyond over the young Dwarf.

Then he walks away, leaving one Prince dead and the other dying.

**Author's Note:**

> Umm … sorry?


End file.
